Digg to sell for USD 300m?

Another Web 2.0 darling is said to be planning to put a "Sale" sign up soon.

According to Valleywag and Techcrunch, Digg is very close to join the rooster of newly acquired startups for a price between USD 300m and USD 400m.

There have been several rumours about Digg.com, which is a Top 100 Alexa website, selling but none have generated as much buzz as this one.

Sources say that a major media player is behind the deal with three potential suitors named : CBS, The New York Times Co. and the Washington Post Co.

As recently as last week, Digg’s CEO, Jay Adelson revealed his personal thoughts on being acquired : "I’m not afraid of being acquired, I just don’t pursue it because we like to solve problems, we don’t like to create them – and often an acquisition can do that."

Digg.com has nearly 22m unique visitors a month with 210m page views, 2m registered users, 1 bn page impressions and a growth rate of 10% and has recently signed a USD 100m multi year contract with Microsoft over advertising.

Web statistics specialist Compete puts the price of each Digg user at roughly USD 16.30 which is 38 times less than that of a Facebook user.

Conde Nast which runs Wired and other websites, acquired Boston-based Reddit, which is one of the main Digg competitors for an undisclosed sum and Digg is the only remaining original news aggregator.

Digg.com itself has been rumoured to purchase Memeame which is a Digg-clone operating in the Spanish market although in a recent Guardian interview, Jay Adelson said that Digg would just let others copy rather than sue them or work against them, arguing that it would help Digg grow.